The term "like watching a train wreck" gets thrown around a lot, but this book made me literally feel like I was standing at the window of the Hazel, or maybe a corner table, and unable to look away as all these characters entered my life, and their pasts were painfully, and plainly laid out in front of me, and then be unable to look away as the tension between them is built moment by moment, and faster and faster, giving the impression of explosive charges ricocheting around a room. And all you can do is watch and wait for two to collide and set them all off.

This book is a hard read with a lot of very upsetting passages. I was upset with characters, angry with characters, made sad and frustrated by characters. Reading the book (or sometimes just thinking about it) made my chest feel tight, made my brain feel full of cotton balls, and made my heart race. But it was such. a. good. read. Coles masterfully builds each character, the Hazel, and the experience of being in Newfoundland so that you are helpless to the text and drawn in until you're done.